Oh yeah… competitive analysis. The most boring part of any product discussion. Why talk about somebody else's market share when you could be waxing rhapsodic about your vertex shaders? Trouble is, the publisher wants to know what they'll be going up against before they invest a few million bucks in your game. So one of the first questions they're going to ask when the presentation's over is, "Who do you see as your main competition?" And the next one will be, "What makes you better than them?" And you'd better be ready with the answers, or you're wasting their time.

Strange Agency develops unique computer game analysis software and essential reports for the computer games industry.
Our Strange Analyst software can reduce the cost and risk associated with the research and development of computer games, allowing developers instant access to thousands of detailed computer game profiles to compare their concept against.

February 2006

Three things must happen in order for there to be gameplay:
* The player must get information about the state of the game.
* The player must be able to affect the game, creating new game states.
* New game states must be communicated to the player prompting further actions
In addition in almost all types of game:
* The game creates new states without the player's input.

# Make it really hard.
# Have a dozen mediocre game modes instead of one good one.
# Make it a 600 MB download that requires two next generation video cards and 4GB RAM.
# Price your game at $35 or $3.50 and sell only from your myspace homepage.
# Use the right mouse button.
# Give it a terrible name or theme.
# Award low scores.
# Expect users to read.
# Make it challenging and cerebral.
# Ignore what everyone else says about your game.

Games designers have a tendency to overlook or dismiss alea (chance), although in cultural terms it is a highly significant class of games. The global video games industry has around $28,000 million turnover, whereas the global gambling industry is worth a staggering $1,098,000 million, forty times as much.

This talk was given as part of an IBM Games on Demand webcast conference.
“We should remember that 90% of the online game players out there are playing a game that was not developed by a professional: they’re playing CounterStrike, which was user-created.”

November 2005

"Eric Zimmerman has run "Game Design Challenges" at several GDC's now. At each, he picks a difficult topic to design a game about, and then lets loose three designers to come up with a game based on the topic. I participated in the inaugural one in 2004, losing to Will Wright's "Collateral Romance" idea, which involved setting non-combatants down inside a first person shooter, with the task of making it to the other side a la Casablanca, and hoping that they would form attachments along the way. Warren Spector didn't come up with a game idea, and I presented what's below."

"This is an approximate transcript of the text of my lecture at the 2004 GDC. I present it in this form because the nature of the material does not lend itself to the traditional paper format. Also, because the lecture is informal and to some extent ad-libbed, this is not a verbatim document."

"I wanted to briefly mention two very different games that I’ve been spending time with recently. The first is Guitar Hero by Harmonix and the second is Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space by Digital Eel. Neither is a traditional game, and both have some good lessons about game design to share."

"Why is game design often overlooked as an important factor contributing to game sales? Perhaps because when most people in development companies talk about “good game design,” they mean “game design that produced a game I really like.” This sort of subjective validation of game design is of no use in business, which thrives on repeatable methods based around capturing a target audience—the market. Unable to see the profit resulting from “good design”— especially since many allegedly well-designed games fail commercially— most businessmen ignore design entirely."

What does it mean to talk of a grammar of game design? And does specifying such a grammar give us an insight into the underlying structure of games, or a new method for approaching game design - or both? Because games vary from pure mathematical formalisms (at the ludic extreme) to behavioural descriptions (at the opposite extreme), any formal reductionistic system will either be focused primarily on the former, or require sufficient latitude to express practically infinite diversity. One such approach is to define a categorial grammar of game design.